Less than a week ago, Mike Gillis altered the franchise's immediate and long-term trajectory by dealing a rookie heralded as the second coming of Linden, and sending him to Buffalo. Yes, a week ago today Cody Hodgson was a member of the Vancouver Canucks (though he'd just had a meeting with the coach, and indirectly forced the team's hand over three minutes of ice-time per game). Today: he returns to Vancouver to face the Canucks as a member of the Sabres, a hockey team that represents inarguably the crappiest, loser town in North America.

There are Canucks fans who fell so deeply and irrationally in love with Cody Hodgson's shooting percentage and youthful charm, that they'll be rooting for the rookie to play well in Vancouver tonight. I'm not one of those Canucks fans. I for one, hope Vigneault has money on the board tonight: half of it for the team keeping Hodgson off the scoresheet, and the other half for targeting him physically every chance they get.

A more thorough preview, the three keys to the game and underlying numbers after the jump!

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The comparison in the title is one that has come up over the last couple of days. Vancouver Sun reporter Elliott Pap brought up one of the Canucks’ greatest trade victories in his take on the Kassian-for-Hodgson deal, and suggested that this time the Canucks might find themselves on the other end of things.

Friday night, Grabner scored his 20th and 21st goals of the season in New York’s 9-3 win over the Pittsburgh Penguins. By the way, that’s one more goal than 2009 No. 1 overall pick John Tavares has with the Islanders this season.

Grabner is on pace for 30 goals and was one of the rookies selected to play in last month’s all-star weekend festivities, where he won the fastest skater competition.

Think Gillis and Tallon wouldn’t both like a mulligan on him?

Looking at this in retrospect, you can see why I'm not getting too beat up over the fact that the Vancouver Canucks also dealt Cody Hodgson while he was going through a similar offensive stretch to Michael Grabner in New York one year ago.